Saturday, January 19, 2002
India, Russia may jointly build advanced fighter plane
Fred Weir
(Moscow, January 18)
Russia is launching a crash programme to build an advanced "fifth generation" fighter plane and may ask India to be a partner in the project, says a Kremlin official. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who oversees Russia's flagging arms industry, told the weekly Expert magazine that all stops must be pulled out to produce a fighter plane capable of matching the latest US and European models. Russia has one flying prototype of the Sukhoi S-38 Berkut, a multi-functional superfighter, but the project is years behind the US F-22 Raptor and the European Union's Eurofighter. Other candidates for a Russian "fifth generation" fighter are still on the drawing boards. Klebanov said funds would have to be found outside the military budget to pay the initial $1.5-billion development costs. He cited Russia's growing arms exports as one possible source. In meetings last year with Jaswant Singh, then India’s acting defence minister, Klebanov discussed the possibility of sharing R&D costs for the superfighter with India. "We are changing the direction of our cooperation with India towards joint development and joint manufacture of military hardware," he said.
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